TFS Writing Student Avery Peachey-Hill Steps in Front of the Camera for Sterling Point

When Avery Peachey-Hill’s agent asked if she could do a French accent for an upcoming audition for Prime Video’s latest young adult series, Sterling Point, her answer was an immediate yes.

There was just one small problem: she’d never actually done one professionally before.

So, the Toronto Film School Screenwriting student got to work, watching videos, studying pronunciation and recording herself on her phone until she felt ready to submit her audition.

“I kind of just had to jump in head first,” she recalled.

The gamble paid off.

Within about 24 hours of submitting her audition for the Megan Park-created show, Avery received an availability call. The day after that, she was at a Sterling Point fitting preparing to play Capucine, a deadpan and unapologetically honest French exchange student.

For Avery, who began pursuing acting professionally in 2023, landing the role was both an exciting career milestone and a chance to learn firsthand from an experienced cast and crew.

“This role has made me more hungry for it,” she said.

Writing Stories and Stepping Inside Them

Avery’s love of acting first took shape through theatre in high school. She began pursuing it professionally in 2023 and signed with an agent in June 2024, all while continuing to develop another side of herself as a storyteller.

That interest in storytelling eventually led her to Toronto Film School’s Online Screenwriting program, where she has found a way to develop her screenwriting skills without giving up acting.

For Avery, the two crafts feed into one another. Reading and writing scripts help her better understand the characters she performs, while acting gives her another perspective when developing characters and dialogue on the page.

TFS’s online format has also given her the flexibility to balance coursework with auditions, self-tapes, acting opportunities and her job. Some weeks, that means juggling five or six self-tapes on top of everything else.

It can get overwhelming, she admitted, but it is a kind of busy she does not take for granted.

“I’m very privileged to be overwhelmed with something that I love so much.”

A Whirlwind Booking

If the Sterling Point audition moved quickly, finding out she had landed the role came with a little more suspense.

Avery was working as a server at a pub during one of its busiest shifts of the year when her agent tried to reach her. Hours later, she finally checked her phone and found several missed calls.

Her first thought was that she might have just fumbled one of the biggest opportunities of her career so far.

Thankfully, that was not the case. Her agent was understanding, the opportunity was still hers and Avery came away with one practical lesson she can now laugh about: keep your phone ringer turned on.

Soon, she was preparing to step into the shoes of Capucine. With little time to prepare, Avery focused on making her French accent as believable as she could before arriving on set.

Learning on Set

Avery arrived for her first day on Sterling Point “sweating bullets,” but said her nerves quickly began to fade thanks to the show’s welcoming cast and crew.

One of the moments that made the experience feel especially real came when she met the show’s writer-director Megan Park, who greeted her with a hug.

Avery did her best to play it cool.

“Internally, I lost my mind!” she joked of meeting Park, the writer-director behind The Fallout and My Old Ass.

The moment became even more surreal when Park told Avery she had looked through her Instagram during the casting process and thought she seemed cool. Avery now considers it the kind of memory worth keeping in her back pocket for a bad day.

Once the initial excitement settled, however, Avery started paying close attention to the work happening around her.

She watched how the other actors listened to one another, remained present in scenes, improvised and experimented between takes. Watching Sterling Point lead Ella Rubin perform was especially inspiring, and Avery said the experience has since influenced the way she approaches her own auditions.

When preparing a self-tape now, Avery sometimes finds herself asking: “What would Ella do?”

That curiosity reflects the way she approaches acting more broadly.

“Acting is very similar to a sport,” she explained, noting the importance of continuing to train, study and learn regardless of how far an actor’s career takes them.

“I personally never want to lose the hunger that I started with.”

Learning to Let Go of Perfect

That same drive has shaped Avery’s experience at TFS, where one of her biggest lessons has been learning when to stop perfecting a piece of work and let it go.

A self-described perfectionist, Avery said she can easily return to a screenplay again and again, convinced there is another line to change or detail to improve. School deadlines and feedback have challenged that instinct and helped her become more comfortable submitting work even when she knows someone else may see a different way to approach it.

It’s a lesson that’s translated naturally to acting, too. An audition can be rehearsed and refined over and over, but eventually the tape has to be submitted.

Sometimes, as Avery learned with Sterling Point, you simply have to say yes, do the work and see what happens.

Hungry for What Comes Next

Booking Sterling Point gave Avery something especially meaningful in an industry where hearing “no” is part of the job: a yes.

She also sees progress in the smaller wins. A callback matters. A casting director asking to see her again matters. Another audition is another opportunity to make an impression.

“Consistency is the number one driver to eventually ‘making it’,” she said, while also acknowledging the role timing and luck can play in an actor’s career.

On Sterling Point, Avery was number 22 on the call sheet. Rather than discouraging her, seeing the actors further up that list gave her something to work toward. They had once been early in their careers, too.

Now, she wants more time on set, more characters to explore and, one day, the opportunity to step into a series regular role.

Her dream roles are not necessarily conventional ones, either. Avery is especially drawn to characters that allow an actor to physically transform through movement, prosthetics or special effects makeup. As she put it, sometimes she simply wants to be a goblin.

Making the Most of Every Opportunity

For other emerging creatives, Avery’s advice is not to wait for someone else to create the first opportunity.

Before she had an agent, her first acting role came through a Facebook group. And while her appearance on Sterling Point amounted to only a small amount of screen time, that opportunity has already led to new conversations, connections and experiences she could not have predicted.

Her takeaway is to make the most of whatever comes your way, no matter how small it might initially seem.

Acting has also helped Avery become more comfortable putting herself out there. She knows not everyone will like her work, not every audition will lead to a callback and, more often than not, the answer may still be no.

And she is learning to be okay with that. In fact, she is looking forward to it.

“I’m excited to be told no, hopefully dozens more times, hundreds more times, just so that those yeses feel all the more special.”

And if Sterling Point is any indication, Avery plans to keep saying yes when those opportunities come her way.